"Re: Invariant innit, isn ´t it"

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:20 AM -0700 9/7/06, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Sep 7, 2006, at 9:27 AM, Jonathon Green wrote:
>
>>The point about the current use of 'innit' in London and doubtless
>>across the (young, urban) UK is that while it _does_ indeed elide
>>'isn't
>>it', it is not in fact used, as would be expected, after a question
>>(although this 'traditional' use is of course still as common as
>>ever),
>
>a clarification: what these question tags attach to is not a question
>-- in the sense of an interrogative clause -- but a statement, that
>is, a declarative clause.  the tag *makes* the whole sentence a
>question.
>
>>but as a meaningless punctuation, following a statement.
>
>not, i think, meaningless.  in the examples of the innovative use,
>like the one you cite below, "innit?" is clearly exclamatory.  (and
>in fact the exploitation of interrogative forms for exclamatory uses
>is all over the place, in language after language, english
>included.)  in some of the examples, it also seems to be inviting
>agreement.
>
>it's become a discourse particle, with a variety of functions.
>
It may be relevant that U.K. working and/or regional varieties seem
often ("seem" because I mostly encounter these varieties in
fictional/cinematic representations) to employ syntactically standard
(non-invariant) tags in non-interrogative, non-confirmatory contexts,
e.g. following what is clearly new information for the hearer ("He
left his wife and moved back in with his mum three years ago, didn't
he" or whatever).  These never come with any rising question
intonation of the kind used for confirmation-seeking tags in U.S.
English.  This always strikes me as foreign, but seems to be
unexceptional for the relevant speakers/recipients.  Assuming "innit"
is a reduction/neutralization of tags with this function, some of the
distribution mentioned above or in other posts on this thread are to
be expected.

LH

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